Lightdash’s third act: Building for the future of BI

I’ve told the story before, but my first interaction with Lightdash was trying to hire now Co-founder and CTO Oliver Laslett. I was setting up Moonfire at the time and was so impressed, I offered him a job on the spot. But when he told me what he and Hamzah Chaudhary were building, I asked to invest instead.

Hamzah and Oliver are phenomenal founders. Together, they’ve built a company that’s reshaping how data teams work, bringing the best practices from software engineering into the world of data analytics, and rethinking how everyone can interact with and leverage data.

I sat down with Hamzah to talk about the story so far – from setting up Lightdash at the height of Covid, to building the best – not biggest – team, and becoming (unexpectedly) big in Japan.

From friends to founders

Hamzah and Oliver’s partnership began long before Lightdash. They met at insurtech startup Cytora, where Hamzah was the second engineering hire and eventually director of product management, and Oliver the data science and machine learning lead. Over four years, they became close collaborators.

‘We were friends first and founders second,’ says Hamzah. ‘It means that we both really understand each other's blind spots. I don't know a single better technical operator than Oliver, and I bring the go-to-market and product vision side.’

At Cytora, they shared the same frustration: while software engineers had mature tools and workflows, data teams operated in the wild west – data being thrown around in CSVs, saved on Google Drive, no version control. It was tumbleweeds in terms of tooling.

And it got them both thinking. What happens if you treat data analysts and data engineers like software engineers? And if you do that, what would the workflow look like? What tools could they build to empower them to do more with less?

The answer to those questions became Lightdash.

The leap to build

‘Most BI tools live in a “ClickOps” world, where everything is driven through a graphical UI, but we think about it differently,’ explains Hamzah. ‘We wanted to bring the best practices from software engineering to the world of data, everything that enabled software developers to have supernatural powers of execution: everything-as-code, version-controlled, works with modern IDEs. That’s always been the mission from day one: to empower data people to do more with less.’

Yet taking the leap to build wasn’t easy. ‘Oliver was expecting his first child at the time, and I thought, “Who in their right mind would leave a really well-paying job to start a company now?”,’ recalls Hamzah. ‘But he didn’t skip a beat: “Yeah, let’s do it.”’

It was December 2019. A great time to start a new company.

“Open source Looker”

‘We knew the product we wanted to build, but we thought the best way to validate it was to work with as many companies as we could,’ says Hamzah. Their venture began as a data consultancy in January 2020, allowing them to test their product hypotheses, and build a customer network – all while bootstrapping the business.

So Lightdash, like many great products, started life as an internal tool – a data quality tool built to help run the consultancy business more efficiently. But when one of their customers saw the tool and asked to use it, Hamzah and Oliver knew they were onto something. They wound down the consultancy, went all in on product development, graduated from YC’s Summer 2020 cohort – the first one to be fully remote – and launched it on Hacker News in 2021, where it gained instant traction.

One commenter dubbed it “open source Looker” – a label that stuck.

The power of open source and community

Open source was an intentional decision. ‘Lightdash was always built as a tool for technical people – data analysts, data engineers, analytics engineers – so it was really important that we stuck to our ethos of treating them like software engineers and built tools based on great open standards.’

And this strategy paid off in unexpected ways. They were able to build goodwill with and get a flood of feedback from early users, and it opened doors to companies they would otherwise never have had access to.

One of the first teams to adopt the open source version of Lightdash was Tesla. ‘As a team of five people at the time, having your software used by a company like Tesla is pretty unheard of,’ says Hamzah. ‘We got so much incredible product feedback from a team of that size and calibre – it propelled our growth and helped shape our commercial offering.’

This groundswell of support has been vital. Usage has grown over 50x over the last two years, with two queries being answered every second on the platform, driven by a thriving open-source community.

Hamzah credits much of this success to standing on the shoulders of other great open-source projects, particularly dbt. ‘They built the first really large data community in Slack – 30,000+ people who are super active, transparent, and low-ego. It’s an amazing group of practitioners, and we’ve learned so much from them.’

That was where Lightdash got its first taste of community building – a Slack channel just for Lightdash fans within dbt’s community. ‘That channel still exists today. But as it grew more popular, we realised we needed our own space to fully engage with our users. So, we created a Slack community dedicated to Lightdash.’

Paired with GitHub as the single source of truth for issues, feedback, and product updates, Lightdash’s community has become an engine of innovation and collaboration.

Building in public

The team builds entirely in public, maintaining an open product roadmap on GitHub where users can suggest, upvote, or comment on features.

This creates a feedback loop that not only improves the product, but also helps customers identify their own internal bottlenecks. If only one person requests a feature, it often signals that the issue is unique to them and not something Lightdash needs to build.

This grassroots, open-source community has also fuelled Lightdash’s global expansion.

In Japan, a group of early adopters wrote a series of blog posts in Japanese detailing how they used Lightdash, best practices with it, and how they localised it. This led to a wave of inbound interest, and today, Lightdash serves a thriving user base in the country – all managed remotely via Slack, and despite the team speaking no Japanese.

‘We’re even planning our next meetup in Japan because there are so many Lightdash fans out there!’

Fully remote, fully connected

For Hamzah, being fully remote is a superpower. ‘It means we can be wherever people need us to be.’

Lightdash is distributed across Europe and the US, but that doesn’t mean sacrificing connection. When someone joins the team, they spend at least a week onboarding in person with Hamzah and Oliver. They also regularly fly to their customers to sit with users.

‘It’s about gaining a deep understanding of our customers – how they use the product, and what their challenges are,’ says Hamzah. ‘That level of insight is invaluable.’

Best not biggest

Lightdash’s hiring philosophy is guided by a simple question: are we hiring this person because nobody’s doing this job, or because someone is doing it and we’ve realised it’s important enough to warrant a full-time role?

Even when everyone in 2020-21 was rapidly increasing head-count in the zero-interest era, Hamzah and Oliver stuck to their formula.

‘At the time, team building our way was very uncool, because why not just hire as many people as you can?’ recalls Hamzah. ‘But we want to build the best team, not the biggest.’

And it’s a formula that works. Lightdash is a team of just 13 people, doing the work of ten times that number. ‘We always try to understand how much leverage we’re getting as a team – and hire people who are comfortable thinking in and building systems that amplify that. We screen for folks who are in the top 1% of that mindset.’

This systems-driven approach not only keeps the team efficient but also enables them to move quickly. ‘We optimize for speed of decision-making,’ Hamzah says. ‘Aim for 100 decisions a month, not 10 a year. That velocity gives you more chances to be right and course-correct when you’re wrong.’

From day one

Moonfire has been part of Lightdash’s story from the very beginning – and vice versa. ‘We both kind of started our companies at the same time,’ says Hamzah. ‘We’ve both watched each other grow.’

‘Moonfire supported us in taking the leap from bootstrapping to thinking bigger and then getting into YC. The team has been super helpful in helping us navigate the process of everything we needed to do from pitching to getting ready for the next round of funding. They’ve been instrumental all the way through.’

Our team are Lightdash superfans. Jonas, our Staff ML Engineer, was one of the first to test Lightdash’s new AI analyst, and Mike is a long-time sparring partner for the team when it comes to technical architecture decisions.

The third act

Lightdash, in Hamzah’s words, has so far been a company of two acts.

In the first act, they focused solely on data teams. In its second, Lightdash has evolved to serve two distinct personas: technical users, who enjoy a full developer workflow and configuration options, and business users, who get a streamlined, “on rails” experience.

Their AI analyst lowers barriers even further, empowering non-technical users to access and act on insights independently. Today, over 80% of daily active users on Lightdash are non-data team members, answering their own data questions.

And for their third? Hamzah and Oliver want to build for the future of BI and data analytics – not just for the next year, but for the next five or ten.

‘If the current rate of improvement in AI models continues – and there’s no reason to think it won’t – the way people interact with data will fundamentally change. There’s a huge opportunity to build for that.’

Hamzah sees a world where data literacy is as common as knowing how to browse the internet. Traditionally, BI tools have been passive, providing insights through dashboards or reports that require manual follow-up. Lightdash wants to embed action directly into the analytics experience, streamlining everything to transform BI from a cost centre into a profit centre.

‘You see the insight on the dashboard, click a button, and instantly trigger the necessary actions, like sending a reactivation campaign or notifying a rep to schedule a call. All from one place.’

Hamzah and Oliver are true builders, and I know as Lightdash moves into its third act they will maintain that unshakable focus on building the best product for their users, and the best team to build it.